poetry

Charon’s Obol

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Charon’s Obol
–Madeleine Wattenberg

My father gave me a small jar of honey
and each night I took a secret lick.
Long after the gold hardened to granule
my tongue returned to my mouth sweet.
Later he placed between my lips a sliver of peach
or a white pastille
dissolving down—homeopathic moon.
I kept my tongue clean beneath those gifts.

My tongue has since turned.
Sliding against the edges of men,
I wonder where that gold’s gotten to
and settle for a boy who tastes of copper,
who flaps like a whiskey-watered hawk
and scatters me.
I know you don’t mean it—I’d repeated,
until he refused me passage in his horror.
Empty anther. I wash him off with mint.
His sorrys fill my bed until I’m crowded out.
I count them like coin and at night they rattle.

We hope sounds will open our mouths
and force us into breath. I place a coin
across my tongue and practice dying.
In some cold places, the obol staves
return. My lips seal in the acerbic promise;
whole rivers run through me.
How can I know which boat to board—
I’m just trying to pay my way.

He removes the coin from my mouth
with his own hand. My sordid god.
But this is nothing new, this reaching into
and withdrawing. The truth is
I’d tongue the honey from most any hand
that granted me a crossing.

Photo by Art Rachen on Unsplash

 

 

milk tree

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Milk Tree
–Laura Kasischke

Heavy fruit
on bony branches
full of the knowledge one always encounters
too late
at the end of a life. Some

aspirin mixed with water, and a mouse
born in a dream. The sounds my son
once made while suckling. That, made
manifest. Little
milksop
and myself. Our

bodies, temporary
shelters, rented
breath. Not even
here long enough
to lament.

Today the breeze wears a fern:

Shiver
and living in the world, in
your brief green dress.

The amputated breast, like
a soul made out of flesh.

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

binds

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For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

 

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash 

advice for former selves

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Advice for Former Selves
–Kate Baer

 

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

remembering

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Remembering
–P.K. Page

Remembering you and reviewing
our structural love
the past re-arises alive
from its smothering dust.
For memory, which is only decadent
in hands like a miser’s
loving the thing for its thingness,
or in the eyes of collectors who assess
the size, the incredible size, of their collection,
can, in the living head, create and make
new the sometimes appallingly ancient present
and sting the sleeping thing
to a sudden seeing.
And as a tree with all its leaves relaxed
can shiver at the memory of wind
or the still waters of a pool recall
their springing origin and rise and fall
suddenly over the encircling basin’s lip—
so I, remembering from now to then,
can know and see and feel again, as jewels
must when held in a brilliant branch of sun.

the day

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The Day
–James Schuyler

Photo by Ari Apple on Unsplash

monroeville

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Monroeville, PA
–Ed Ochester
One day a kid yelled
“Hey Asshole!”
and everybody on the street
turned around.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

try

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Try
–Maggie Anderson
To move the language toward happiness,
or failing that, toward love. Like this:
the trees have undone their sandals and silk saris,
thrown light scarves down onto the brickwork.
One red thread is caught mid-air on an updraft,
held by a spider web. Remember the way
he described the green soup he moved through
coming out of surgery? A swift current
of warm water, swirling and turning among
floating cylinders, friends inside them talking.
Next door the little boy swings higher and higher.
His half-scream is also half-laugh — more, more.
Follow the vowels; laudanum, potpourri, chrysanthemum.
Trust the verbs: to meander, to sashay, to bear up.

Photo by Pedro Vit on Unsplash 

today, another universe

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Today, Another Universe
–Jane Hirshfield

The arborist has determined:
senescence         beetles       canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable     not treatable     not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty foot playground.

The bark  cambium    pine-sap    cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns       the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

after your death

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After Your Death
–Natasha Trethewey

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash